In modern sports history, there is no event more iconic and distinctly American than the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl can be summed up a few ways.
- amazing athletes
- incredibly passionate fans
- gigantic viewership
- ridiculously expensive
- massive power consumption
You might be wondering, how much money, energy, and electricity is used at the Super Bowl event. Think about all of the power running through the stadium, and how much power it takes to support all of the TV’s watching the game across the world.
Television/Home Appliance Energy Consumption
All across the globe, there are approximately thirty million television sets tuned in to this much-awaited sporting event. The amount of power that a TV consumes varies roughly from 20 W to 200 W. Let’s pick somewhere in the middle, say 125 W. If you multiply thirty million TV’s by five hours of time watching the Super Bowl, that’s roughly 37.5 million kilowatt hours of energy. This does not include the lighting, fridge, fan, and other home appliance used, or the entire Super Bowl stadium for that matter. That power generation rolls into the millions of dollars for just 5 hours.
Stadium Energy Consumption
At the actual football event, there is air conditioning, tons of lightning, TV station equipment and monitors using up massive amounts of electricity. A football stadium could easily utilize about ten megawatts per hour of energy or about fifty megawatts an hour for the entire duration of the game. The total costs can easily balloon to tens of thousands of dollars in energy consumption.
Fans Traveling To The Super Bowl Event
Another major spender for the event is the transportation of tens of thousands of fans to the stadium. This will surely use up some energy in the form of fuel. The total amount of energy used will vary depending on the location of the stadium and where exactly the people will be coming from. Considering the size of the USA, a fan could fly some 1,500 miles via aircraft. Just for fun, if every attendee were to fly the maximum distance, hundreds of planes would be needed. The amount of fuel needed for that many planes would be millions.
Even for us that simply push a button to turn on the TV to watch the Super Bowl, the amount of energy that goes into spectating the Super Bowl is fascinating.
